New Fiction Faculty Member Rachel Swearingen Recommends Two Contemporary Classics to Read - and Read Again
During the last dark days of this past December, I scanned my bookshelves for a few books. I wanted to luxuriate in a rich voice and story, to escape for a few days. The year had been intense, and I visited my library like a supplicant, trusting that I’d find just the right books by running my fingers over the bindings. My hands went to two novels I’ve read before: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. These are slow-burn tales that reward attention and patience. Both feature narrators who have lingered with me over the years, characters who evade, circle, dodge, and try to make sense of puzzling events. I read them back to back over several nights, happily wrapped in their narrative cocoons, surprised at how fresh the stories remained despite my knowing the endings.
Never Let Me Go is an elegant novel of just twenty-three chapters. The book is narrated by Kathy H., a young “carer” for “donors” in a world where humans are cloned for the sole purpose of organ donation. While this sounds like science fiction, Ishiguro sets the story in a world of isolated boarding schools and prosaic villages. Kathy never feels the need to go into the science of cloning or the history of donors because these details are no more interesting to her than the intricacies of history and biology are to what she calls “normals.” Educated at the isolated academy Hailsham, Kathy, along with her friends Tommy and Ruth, has been raised to believe that donating her organs is her civic duty. She rarely questions her fate until she is forced to navigate love and friendship, and until she encounters an outside world that doesn’t recognize her humanity.
Because Ishiguro embodies Kathy so fully, we are forced to experience her loss of innocence as she does. From the very first descriptions of Hailsham we sense something is off. As Kathy recounts her history with Tommy and Ruth, behind her reserved tone is nostalgia, bewilderment, and horror. That Kathy is unable to separate herself from the system she was born into makes that horror all the more palpable for the reader. Hailsham is not just a setting, it is a symbol and a container for the kind of state systems and propaganda that are used to benefit one group by exploiting and isolating another. Kathy H. is both tragic and heroic, and the image of Hailsham she presents us with turns ever more ghostly and unsettling.
If Kathy haunts, Janina in Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, provokes. This novel also features an isolated community and a dazed witness to horrific events. The story takes place in a forest community on the Polish side of the border to the Czech Republic. Janina, the narrator, is a misanthropic older woman who tutors English to the village school children. She is fascinated by linguistics, literature, animals, ancient astrology, and nomenclature. The book opens in winter with Janina and her neighbor Oddball discovering the grisly death of another neighbor, a man she calls Bigfoot. Like Ishiguro, Tokarczuk plays with genre as a way to pose larger philosophical questions. What is most important is not who committed what turns into a string of murders, but rather why and whether these crimes are in any way morally defensible.
For all its gruesomeness, Drive Your Plow is often darkly funny. A keen observer of human weaknesses and eccentricities, Janina pokes fun at herself as much as at her fellow villagers. She describes herself as a loner, yet she draws the other village misfits to her in a protective ring, enlisting them in her absurd theories as she looks for clues in natal charts and the poetry of William Blake.
Both Janina and Kathy H. are unreliable in their own ways, but Janina is a trickster, while Kathy H. is sincere. Janina’s tale-weaving is slippery, and she keeps the reader off-kilter, provocative one moment and vulnerable the next. Whereas Never Let Me Go holds onto the reader and keeps us in a sort of trance, Drive Your Plow pulls the reader along and then suddenly arrests with a moving passage or a seemingly preposterous event that makes you set the book down to think about the treatment of animals and the challenges of co-existence between people with opposite views. This may be what ultimately drew me back to both novels—not only their narrative craft, but the deeper yearning for ethical reckoning that each narrator reveals over time. Both stories feature individuals at odds with the larger systems they were born into—systems they are, in many ways, powerless to change. What makes these books endlessly re-readable is not only their spell-weaving storytelling, but the moral unease each narrator leaves unresolved.